Lead cost nearly halved without a new strategy

The problem

Three small leaks, compounding. First, disapprovals: 11 of the account's 84 ads sat disapproved or limited, several for months, including the best performers in four territories. Nobody knew, because nobody was told; disapprovals do not email the owner, and Google removed 8.3 billion ads across 2025, so enforcement contact is routine rather than rare. Territories with dead top ads leaned on their weaker second-string creative, and quality scores drifted down with them.

Second, weekends. Cleaning is a Monday-morning search vertical, but the shared budgets ran flat across all seven days, overspending quiet Saturdays and starving hot Monday mornings. Third, blend: fourteen territories shared four campaigns, so franchisee complaints about lead costs could be neither confirmed nor refuted, and against the personal-services median of $54.60 cost per lead, €47 looked defensible on paper while three territories quietly paid over €70.

The approach

Week one: the radar up, and the disapproval scan earned its keep on day two by surfacing all 11 dead ads. Recovery followed Google's actual process rather than folklore: fix the policy issue in the ad or destination first, then request the re-review, since appeals without fixes feed the strike system. Nine came back within the week; two were rewritten from scratch.

Weeks two to three: territory separation, with fourteen campaigns replacing four, each carrying its own budget and a dayparting curve matched to the vertical's Monday tilt. Weekend pacing alerts capped the Saturday drift the same week. Weeks four to five: negative themes rebuilt (job seekers, "how to clean" queries, one persistent celebrity coincidence), and the booking form's conversion tag added to the heartbeat watch after we found it had a history of dying during theme updates.

The result

Cost per booking request settled at €26, down 45%, with lead volume up 12% on identical spend. Against the $54.60 personal-services median, €26 puts the franchise in genuinely strong territory, and the per-territory view ended the internal argument: every franchisee now sees their own number monthly, and the two territories that stayed expensive turned out to have coverage gaps, a business problem the marketing data finally made visible. The strategy deck the franchise expected us to present was never written. The incident log was, and it runs four entries a quarter.

What generalizes: in franchise accounts, blended reporting manufactures conflict and disapprovals hide in plain sight. The watching layer is documented under PPC monitoring, and the disapproval mechanics get a full guide in our disapprovals walkthrough.